While I sit here, exhausted from a summer research fellowship, contemplating the sound of crickets outside my rented bedroom window, I grow sullen with the recollection of all that I actually didn't do this summer. I didn't read the rest of Moby Dick--indeed, I haven't finished a single novel that I had hoped to finish. I didn't work on finishing an essay manuscript for publication. I haven't begun to edit the essays for the journal I'll be working on this school year. And I didn't accomplish a dozen other things that depress me with their taunting looks.
Today a friend told me that I need to take breaks, that I need to know when I'm done with a project for the day and simply rest. The problem of not knowing when to quit runs in my family. My parents are in their sixties and they are farming a three acre garden. Similar stories about grandparents who never knew when to quite, to take a rest, to just do nothing, abound in my family tree. Rest has been a recessive trait in my family for generations.
But on one good note to begin this new blog, I heard back from an editor about an essay I submitted a month back. The editor would like me to bolster my argument with some stuff on intellectual property in the early Republic. I appreciate the editor's feedback, particularly because it was a very promising and complimenting readers' report for an editor known to be somewhat phlegmatic. I mean, there's no promise that the readers who will read the essay will like it, but, well, one must look for something positive amidst a morass of seeming failure and, well, wannabe malingering.
